“George: That’s not your grandfather.
Paul: It is, you know.
George: But I’ve seen your grandfather. He lives in your house.
Paul: Oh, that’s my other grandfather, but he’s my grandfather, as well.
John: How do you reckon that one out?
Paul: Well, everyone’s entitled to two, aren’t they?”

~ The Beatles, “A Hard Day’s Night”

My friends will sometimes talk about their grandfathers as if they are gods. They’ll share stories of love and fun and good times. And I am always jealous.

I can barely remember either of my grandfathers. They both died when I was young and they both were sick for most of my life. I had Grandpa Ball (my mother’s father), simply called Grandpa, and Grandpa Edwards (my father’s father), always known as Gramps in our household. Whenever I hear stories told of these two men, I always feel a pride in the fact that I am related to them by blood. But I can barely remember them. And this breaks my heart.

As I’ve said, both men were sick for most of my life. I don’t think I ever saw Grandpa walk. The only time I ever saw Gramps walk was when he would walk from his chair to the kitchen every night to pour himself a bowl of cereal.

I remember my Gramps chair. I remember thinking it was a sin for anyone other than him to be sitting in it. I sat in it after he died, and immediately got up. I vaguely remember sitting on his lap when I was young, the smell of medicine and the touch of calloused hands.

I remember when I first heard Gramps life story. It was the life sung by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. It was the life of a working class hero. I remember hearing stories of a strong faith in God. I remember a quiet old man with a raspy voice. I remember a man who loved his family. The nativity story on Christmas morning. Grocery shopping on a hot summer’s day.

I remember the day Gramps died. And that’s the most vivid memory of all. Leaving school early. Arriving too late. Leaning on my father’s chest. Lifeless body on the bed. The bed I used to sleep in. Children crying in the backyard. Emotionless. Confused.

I cried at his funeral. All I have left are stories and vague memories.

Memories of Grandpa are even fewer. I don’t remember a time when he wasn’t sick. I remember a stupid knock knock joke I would tell him, and he would laugh every time. “Knock knock. Who’s there? Tommy. Tommy who? Tommy ache.” And he would laugh and laugh. I know that he loved me. I know I loved him. I remember my grandparents’ home up north in Roscommon. It was like a second home to me. He was sick every time we went.

I cried at his funeral. All I have left are stupid jokes and sickness.

I never said goodbye to either of them. I can barely even remember their voices.

It’s 4:30 in the morning right now and I am crying. I couldn’t sleep because the memory of these two men wouldn’t leave my mind. I barely knew them, yet I love them more than anybody that ever lived.

Sometimes I wonder why God would choose to taunt me with friends who tell me stories of their loving grandfathers. Sometimes I think God is the cruelest person in existence.

But then memories of these men come and haunt me. And I know that, though they are gone, they have made me a better person just by being there. And I know God wants me to celebrate what I had… what I have.

Maybe someday I’ll have children. I will tell them the memories I have of my grandfathers. I will tell my children they come from the two greatest men who ever lived.

Maybe someday I’ll have grandchildren and I will be a grandfather myself. And maybe my grandchildren will look up to me as a great man. Maybe someday they will want to be like me. That would be the greatest honor. And that is all I want.

The First Baptist Church of Ann Arbor’s experiment in providing a rudimentary shelter for the homeless is coming to an end.

Sometime this week, a wooden pavilion the church built in 2008 at a cost of more than $15,000, will be removed and given to the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens.

The church, 517 E. Washington St., tried but did not have success in managing “problematic behavior” among the homeless men who slept in the pavilion, co-pastor Paul Simpson Duke said.

The pavilion was built as an alternative for the homeless who had been sleeping on the church grounds, particularly under the large portico at the entrance to the building. Some church members felt unsafe when entering or leaving the church as a result.

The church wanted to be compassionate and did not want to remove the homeless; some were ineligible to receive assistance from local shelters, Duke said. So the church settled on the idea of building the pavilion, which has a roof and floor, but no walls, and put it on the side of the church’s property.

But it became a place for people to gather and drink and take drugs, Duke said. There were fights among the people who stayed there. And the church had concerns about noise and lewdness affecting its next-door neighbors, he said.

So where did this attempt go wrong? What are the obligations of the church (locally) to lose within its ministry area who are homeless mainly because of self-inflicted causes: drug abuse, anti-social behavior, criminal activity, etc.?

We’ll discuss these questions with Dr. David Apple from Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia today at 4:00 pm ET on The Paul Edwards Program. Dr. Apple is the Director of Mercy Ministry for Tenth Presbyterian. Through their ACTS (Active Compassion through Service) they mobilize 300 volunteers every week to ministry to the homeless, people with AIDS, at-risk children, single parents, nursing home residents, the incarcerated, and people with special needs.

By developing a Bible based approach to caring for the poor they have developed a program with well-defined ground rules. They have trained their people. They understand from a biblical perspective what the role of deacon is. All of this and more combines to produce a successful approach to ministering to real people in adverse circumstances.

Tune in today (Tuesday, June 1, 2010) at 4:00 pm for more.

I was interested to read this from DeYoung on the question of how the (evangelical) Lord’s Supper differs from the Catholic Mass:

To be fair, Catholic theology does not consider the Eucharist a re-sacrifice of Christ. “The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice…” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1367). Thus, Catholic theologians do not agree with the Heidelberg that the Mass is “nothing but a denial of the one sacrifice and suffering of Jesus Christ.” The sacrifice of Christ and the Eucharist are one sacrifice performed in different ways, they would argue. Official Catholic teaching does not argue that Christ’s death must be repeated over and over. Rather, it teaches that in the Eucharist the death of Christ is pulled into the present for us to enjoy sacramentally. No Catholic who knows his official theology would claim that the Mass repeats the atoning sacrifice of Christ, because the sacrifice is “ever present” (CCC 1364).

I’m almost ashamed to admit that this is the first time I have ever heard this distinction. Are evangelicals closer to Catholics in our understanding of the real presence of Christ at the Table than we may have previously imagined?

4:00pm: Dr. David Apple, Director of Mercy Ministry for Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia
Ann Arbor church’s effort to help homeless fails 

5:05pm: Jonathan Merritt on his Washington Post Op/Ed
“Why Aren’t Christians Mourning the Oil Spill?”

I covered this for two days on my own program here in Detroit, concluding yesterday with a summary of what the Bible says about how much a pastor can be compensated. Listener Jeff missed that part of the program and asked me to summarize the scriptural points, which I am happy to do here.

Here’s the gist of what I said about how the Bible puts boundaries around a pastor’s compensation:

I first went to the Old Testament and talked about how the Levites lived off of the sacrifices (animal sacrifices and offerings), making the point that God expects his people to care for and provide the support for the life of their shepherds/spiritual leaders. How much of those offerings could be utilized by the Levites was clearly stipulated. There were boundaries on the living the Levites could make off God’s people.

I then talked about how Jesus told his disciples not to carry a purse or money, making the point that money should not be the priority of ministry and further that any size purse is never big enough, creating in us a desire to accumulate more and more wealth. I cited the verse that “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

Then we went to 1 Timothy and Titus and pointed out that in both lists of the qualifications for pastors, a warning about money is mentioned. Then to Hebrews 13:5 – 7 where the writer warns us to “keep our lives free from the love of money,” doing so in the context of imitating “the way of life” of our leaders, a clear indication that a pastor’s life should not be characterized by wealth. Then to I Peter 5 where Peter warned his fellow elders to fulfill their calling “willingly, not under compulsion, and not for greedy gain.”

Finally to 1 Timothy 5 where Paul makes it clear that we are not to muzzle the ox who treads the corn, that the laborer (the one who labors in teaching the word) is worthy of his hire, but that Paul himself did not make the ministry his sole source of support for his lifestyle (1 Corinthians 4:12; 1 Thessalonians 2:9; 2 Thessalonians 3:8), therefore the best approach would be for ministers/pastors WHERE POSSIBLE to support themselves through other labor THOUGH SCRIPTURE DOES NOT REQUIRE THIS. That said, however, no pastor should become wealthy by worldly standards strictly from ministry income. The broader point was that the Bible allows for pastors to “live of the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:14), not to get rich by worldly standards from the gospel.

THE FOLLOWING ARE PASTOR EDWARDS’ PULPIT NOTES – NOT A TRANSCRIPT

God intends for the way we interact with one another as believers to help redefine love and beauty for fallen humanity. The basis of our interaction with one another is love.

 Love is an affection for another’s good, recognizing that the ultimate good is God. Love is from God as a gift as distinguished from the common way we view love: love as desire or attraction.

Love as desire or attraction says, “I love you because you are beautiful, good, rich, etc.” The Bible doesn’t deny this kind of love exists. It just doesn’t make it primary.

Love as gift (benevolence) is not prompted by the attractiveness of the one loved but rather by a quality of benevolence in the one who is showing love: “I love you because I want to do you good.” This is the primary focus of love in the Bible.

During the next two Sunday morning services we will examine both of these views of love, aiming for this conclusion: The highest expression of love is God’s love for himself and his own glory. Therefore, we ought to love God for God’s sake, our neighbors for God’s sake, and one another (in the church) for God’s sake. Jonathan Leeman:

 “I should not love you for your own sake; I should love you because you are created in God’s image, because you belong to Him, because he has commanded me to. Love centered on anything other than God is the opposite of love.”

“God does not love humanity because he sensed anything intrinsically valuable in us. God loves everyone because he beholds his own handiwork, image, and glory in everyone.”

 What influences our ideas about love that place them opposition to biblical ideas about love?

 1.                  The American Concept of Individualism

The creed of American individualism is: “I am principally obligated to myself and maximizing my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”

Every attachment is negotiable. We are all free agents, and every relationship is a contract that can be renegotiated or canceled.

This self-actualization and self-realization has fundamentally altered the way we think about love. A romanticized love has replaced rational compassion as the ideal in all of our relationships:

Rational love (agape) or compassion is motivated by the others’ ultimate good.

Romantic love (eros) is motivated by how the other ultimately makes me feel, based not on loving the other for the sake of God, but rather on loving the other for the sake of ourselves:

 “I might claim to love you, but it’s really the way that you make me feel that I love. You make me feel accepted, smart, inspired, romantic, tingly, encouraged, special, warm and fuzzy, turned on, attracted, attractive, , hot, all that I can be, hardworking, creative, full of life, intellectually edified, spiritually edified, like a hero, empowered, built up, great! As John Piper has said, we call it “love” when people “make much of us.”

 When self-actualization and self-realization become the basis for our love in the church, the focus of our ministry becomes therapy and not the gospel, because how you feel is more important than any truth about what you actually are.

2.                  Consumerism, or maximizing purchases for my benefit

The focus on the individual ultimately leads to a consumer mindset in every area of life, including love.

Love becomes an exchange: what does this person possess in terms of character traits, external beauty, resources, etc that will serve to fulfill me and my desires.

The object of our desires becomes the deciding factor rather than the faculty (rationalizing) of desire. In other words, when the object of our desire becomes the sole focus of our desires, we never stop to ask, “Are my desires right?”

 Superficiality is the normal result. We focus on externals rather than on deeper unseen qualities. Beauty more than character, income more than constancy, manners more than virtue.

 How does this focus on maximizing the purchase for my benefit affect my relationship with the church? I decide whether or not I fit into a church fellowship based on superficial externals rather than on quality internals. When superficial externals have my attention more than quality internals, I evaluate my experience rather than my heart.

We might leave a worship service and say things like, “I liked the music, except that one song. The preacher wasn’t very funny. Did you see any programs for teenagers? Am I comfortable with these people – are they like me?”

We must intentionally focus our desires away from our own self-interest and rather ask hard questions about the not so readily apparent internal qualities: is the mission of this church biblical? Is it gospel-centered? Is truth valued over pragmatism?

3.                  A culture opposed to any kind of commitment

If the focus of my love is me and my self-actualization, I will have an aversion to making any kind of long-term or even permanent commitments to another person or organization.

“People today are generally more reluctant to enter into binding commitments and associations that will limit the options available to them in the future.”

We worship the god of options. The consumeristic mindset, the multiplicity of options, and the worry of buyer’s remorse hinders the ability to make commitments in everything from jobs, to spouses, to restaurants, to houses, and to churches.

Commitments are not based on the ultimate value derived for the individual, rather than on moral obligation or a sense of duty or a call to serve or care for the other. Relationships become a function of what is purely advantageous to one’s own well-being. Whenever a relationship becomes inconvenient or demands too much, it is left behind.

When the idea of binding commitment is removed from the definition of love, churches become places where personal sacrifices are seldom made.

How do these characteristics of our contemporary ideas about love fit with Jesus commanding us to “love one another as I have loved you”? Obviously they don’t.

The Bible says, “God is love,” not “Love is God.” We have taken our romanticized view of love and defined God by it, rather than beginning with an understanding of God and defining love by Him.

So if I am going to love you the way Jesus loves you, I need a biblical understanding of God as love, freed from the influences of the romanticized view of love, a subject we will take up next week.

His most recent foray into this effort is The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond (2010: Baylor University Press) in which he asserts that what has come to be known as the “Religious Right” did not have its beginnings as a response to the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion on demand in 1973 (Roe v. Wade). Rather Dr. Balmer forwards a radically different motivation for the formation of conservative evangelical political engagement in the mid to late 1970s: the Green v Connally decision by the District Court of the District of Columbia on June 30, 1971 which threatened the tax exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policy denying admission to students of color.

Balmer’s conclusion that the Roe v. Wade decision was not a precipitating factor in the formation of conservative evangelical political engagement serves as a classic example of historic revisionism. Of the response of evangelicals in 1973 to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion on demand Balmer writes:

While a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly questioned the ruling, the overwhelming response on the part of evangelicals was silence, even approval.

Indeed, Balmer’s thesis is that the abortion issue was only “cobbled into the agenda of the Religious Right” as a political maneuver by Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of evangelical political activism, who knew (according to Balmer’s characterization) that the sterile subject of tax exemption would not rally evangelicals to political action, engendering the kind of emotional response that “protecting those poor, defenseless babies” would create. Randall seems to be asserting that the abortion issue was only a front for the real cause of standing against the IRS for threatening the tax exempt status of evangelical schools. Money. not morals, was the precipitating cause of the Religious Right.

To support his revisionism, Balmer quotes Dr. Edward Dobson who was “formerly Falwell’s assistant at Moral Majority,”:

“The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion. I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

Balmer offers no footnote to cite the source of the above quote, only stating that the comment was made in 1999, and offering no details about the context. So I picked up the phone and called Dr. Dobson, who is now living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

When I asked Dr. Dobson if he recalled making such a statement he replied that while he has no doubt that he may have made such a statement, the way in which Dr. Balmer was using it seemed to be out of context. Dr. Dobson told me, “I have always argued that while abortion was not the major issue in the formation of the Moral Majority, it was certainly one of the issues.”

When I asked Dr. Dobson if he agreed with Randall’s assertion that the Religious Right was formed more as a response to Bob Jones University losing its tax exempt status rather than as a reaction to the Roe v. Wade decision, Dr. Dobson told me that such an assertion was “absolutely false. The subject of Bob Jones University never came up in any conversations as a reason for forming the Moral Majority. In fact, Bob Jones, Jr. once called Jerry Falwell ‘the most dangerous man in America,’ so the notion that these men would be concerned with defending Bob Jones University lacks merit.”

What kind of history is this? On what basis does Balmer reach the conclusion that money and racism were the motivating factors that precipitated conservative political activism and not the moral issues of abortion, marriage, and homosexuality?

Dr. Balmer is firmly in the camp of those who see the purpose of the gospel to be primarily about reforming the ills of society through social action. He’s part of the new “Religious Left,” a category of evangelicals he denied exists during a recent radio interview with me. While his bias is implicit in his conclusions, it’s also explicitly stated. Not until you get to the end of Balmer’s 84 page revisionism does he show his hand:

“For too many years I offered an exasperated defense, arguing that the Bible I read enjoins me to act with justice and points me toward the left of the political spectrum.”

The Making of Evangelicalism is a distortion of facts in support of biased characterizations of conservative evangelicals. In addition to the absurd notion that a defense of the sanctity of life was not the precipitating cause of the formation of the Religious Right, Balmer asserts that conservative Christians opposed women’s rights, supported torture, care more about abortion than divorce, support the destruction of the environment, and favor the affluent more than poor, without once offering a shred of objective balance from those he accuses. This sounds more like Keith Olbermann than a respected historian.

What kind of historian produces a history that presents facts in evidence supporting only half the history?  Balmer has not written a history of the making of evangelicalism. The reality is Balmer is “making up” evangelicalism by reading into history a conclusion influenced by his own progressive bias against conservative evangelical political engagement. History as he would like it to be, not as it was.

4:00 pm – A True American Hero
My guest at the beginning of today’s program is Admiral Jeremiah Denton. Admiral Denton is also the former Senator from Alabama (1981 – 1987). He spent nearly eight years as a POW in Vietnam and is best known as the naval aviator who used his eyes to blink the word “TORTURE” in Morse code during a televised interrogation.

Admiral Denton is a Christian and the author of the book, When Hell Was in Session, made into a motion picture starring Hal Holbrooke.

4:20 pm – Shaping How We Lead by Who We Are
How does our internal relationship with God affect or influence our external relationships with others, especially in the realm of leadership? Robert Fryling is publisher of InterVarsity Press. He brings his years of leadership experience to bear on the issue how we think about our leadership goals and values.

5:05 pm – Christianity and the Culture of Sports
With the Superbowl coming up on Sunday, what better time to examine critically the relationship between sports and faith. Shirl James Hoffman has written an excellent critical analysis of how faith – especially evangelicalism – has acquiesed to a sports culture: Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports.

5:25 pm – The Controversy over Scripture References on Rifle Sights
In the last month it was revealed that a Wixom, MI manufacturer of rifle sights for the US military has customarily inscribed Bible references as part of the serial number on each sight. This has raised concerns about a “Christian Crusade” against Muslims since most of those sights are being used by our military in predominantly Muslim countries. Tom Munsosn from Trijicon – the manufacturer of the sights – gives us his perspective.

So when President Obama held a press conference to update the country on his administration’s response to this near “man made disaster” in the skies over Detroit, you can bet I was hanging on every word. He made his nine minute statement having just emerged from a high level meeting with his cabinet to formulate a response to the Flight 253 attack.

The president called his cabinet together “because we face a challenge of the utmost urgency,” but evidently not so urgent that his aides didn’t inform him about the terror attack over Detroit until three hours after the plane landed. He didn’t make a public statement about it until three days after it had happened. He continued his Hawaiian vacation for ten days after it happened. Remember that President Bush was roundly criticized for continuing to read to kindergartners for five minutes after the attack on 9/11.

The president’s non-pulsed response to a critical breach of airline security not seen since 9/11 is inexplicable unless one concludes that the president does not view his actions or those of his administration as in any way responsible for the breach. In his response to the terror over Detroit he spoke of the “systemic failures” of the  ”intelligence community” and “the U.S. Government,” as if these were entities without a face totally disconnected from his presidency. In fact, in his statement President Obama took no responsibility at all for the failures leading up to the attack over Detroit. Rather he informed us that 

 ”…the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way. And it’s my responsibility to find out why and to correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future.”

So the president calls a press conference to inform us that he isn’t responsible for the system failing. He’s only responsible for finding out why the system failed. He sounded more like a high school football coach whose team is down by 12 at half time:

“Time and again we’ve learned that quickly piecing together information and taking swift action is critical to staying one step ahead of a nimble adversary. So we have to do better, and we will do better. And we have to do it quickly.”

While the president takes no responsibility for “the systemic failures” which allowed a terrorist with a bomb in his pants to board a U. S. aircraft, it seems individual members of his cabinet do take some limited responsibility:

“I appreciate that each of [the members of my team] took responsibility for the shortfalls within their own agencies.”

The president has obviously surrounded himself with imbeciles. He admits that his closest advisers are responsible for “shortfalls within their own agencies” which led to an attack (not a potential attack) on United States citizens on an aircraft bearing United States markings and nobody gets fired?

Nobody gets fired because this president doesn’t view his administration as in any way responsible for what happened over Detroit on Christmas Day. As a matter of fact, I’m not so certain the president even holds the terrorists responsible. The way the president sees it, it’s we – the American people – who make the terrorists want to hate us, maim us, kill us, and disrupt our way of life because of how we have mistreated Al Qaeda enemy combatants at Gitmo! And he’s serious:

“Make no mistake, we will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interest and become a tremendous recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

Enough of this blaming America. It’s time to lead, Mr. President. It’s your “system.” It’s your “intelligence community.” It’s your “U. S. Government.” You’re no longer the Senator from Illinois throwing partisan bricks at the occupant of the White House from the safety of your perch on Capitol Hill. You’re the president. Not of the world, but of the United States. You have been for nearly a year. It’s time to stop blaming “the last eight years.” It’s time for you, Mr. President, to take responsibility for allowing an attack on the United States, thwarted though it was by heroes who were able to accomplish with mere brute force what billions of tax dollars and government bureaucracy was charged with doing but failed to do.

Your first priority as Commander in Chief is to protect the citizens of the United States, not our image in the eyes of the world or the sensibilities of those who hate us. Lead, Mr. President, or get out of the way.